This week I was really delighted to learn that Visual Arts and the Auld Alliance: Scotland, France and National Identity c.1420-1550 (Edinburgh University Press, 2024) has been longlisted for the Berger Prize.

This came in the same week as I learned that it was to be presented to the mayor of Aubigny-sur-Nère at the opening of the Fêtes Franco-Écossaises. So two lovely things. I spent a great deal of time researching in Bourges and Aubigny, so this feels like a really lovely conclusion to all of that work.

Finding out that Visual Arts and the Auld Alliance had made the longlist for the Berger was a fantastic surprise, since I didn’t know that EUP had nominated it.

The books that have made the cut for 2025 are as follows (I am in some wonderful company) :

• Fay Blanchard and Anthony Spira (editors), Vanessa Bell: A World of Form and Colour, Philip Wilson Publishers

• Rosie Broadley (editor), Francis Bacon: Human Presence, National Portrait Gallery

• Bruce Boucher, John Soane’s Cabinet of Curiosities: Reflections on an Architect and his Collection, Yale University Press

• Esther Chadwick, The Radical Print: Art and Politics in Late Eighteenth-Century Britain, Paul Mellon Centre

• Bryony Coombs, Visual Arts and the Auld Alliance: Scotland, France and National Identity c.1420-1550, Edinburgh University Press

• Paul Gough, Gilbert Spencer: The Life and Work of a Very English Artist, Yale University Press

• Bendor Grosvenor, The Invention of British Art, Elliott & Thompson

• Elain Harwood and Alan Powers (editors), Ernö Goldfinger, Liverpool University Press

• Mark Laird, The Dominion of Flowers: Botanical Art & Global Plant Relations, Paul Mellon Centre​

• Cristina S. Martinez and Cynthia E. Roman, Female Printmakers, Printsellers and Publishers in the Eighteenth Century: The Imprint of Women 1735-1830 Cambridge University Press

• Nicholas Olsberg, The Master Builder: William Butterfield and His Times, Lund Humphries

• Madeleine Pelling, Writing on the Wall: Graffiti and Rebellion in Eighteenth-Century Britain, Profile Books

• Eleonora Pistis, Architecture of Knowledge: Hawksmoor and Oxford, Brepols

• Dorothy Price, Esther Chadwick, Cora Gilroy-Ware and Sarah Lea, Entangled Pasts, 1768-now: Art, Colonialism and Change, Royal Academy of Arts

• Natalie Prizel, Victorian Ethical Optics: Innocent Eyes and Aberrant Bodies, Oxford University Press

• Jeff Rosen, Julia Margaret Cameron: The Colonial Shadows of Victorian Photography, Paul Mellon Centre

• Fiona Smyth, Pistols in St Paul’s: Science, music, and architecture in the twentieth century, Manchester University Press

• Gavin Stamp, Interwar British Architecture 1919-39, Profile Books

And just look at them all: